A “Musical Juggling Act”
Water For Elephants, which opened March 21, 2024 at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, is an impressive new musical that juggles many different elements — human acrobatics, animal puppetry, multiple musical genres and sophisticated sound design. It’s the story of a highly educated man who runs away with a circus, unintentionally becomes their veterinarian, and gets entangled in a romantic triangle with a beautiful acrobat and her abusive ringmaster husband. Based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel which also inspired the 2011 film, the late Prohibition-era tale is told in flashback so that the protagonist is seen both as a young and old man.
The Sound Team
Tasked with managing all of the different sonic elements are sound designer Walter Trarbach, his associate sound designer/system architect John McKenna, assistant sound designer/sounds effects specialist Angela Baughman, and their audio team, which also includes production sound engineer Matt Walsh, A2 Jamie Tippett, deck sound/A3 John Cooper and FOH mixer Ron Sinko. FOH chatted with Trarbach, McKenna, and Baughman about the complexity of the production.
The musical score stays true to music of the time — ragtime, big band jazz, bluegrass, country and folk — with some contemporary touches. The pit musicians include a bassist, drummer, two keyboards, two guitars, two reeds, two brass, violin and cello. They are miked with a combination of brands, mainly Shure, Sennheiser and Neumann. Drummer Mike Dobson is also an accomplished Foley artist who plays and triggers sounds throughout the show. He imitates horse and train sounds on the snare, playing brushes with a galloping feel.
“He has the freedom to do whatever he wants,” says Trarbach, “and he was integral to the creation of the sound of the piece.” Baughman created most of the sound effects, but Dobson sometimes augments them. “We’ll do a whistle and a screech, and then he’ll do ‘chugga chugga’ on the toms and snares. Sometimes we do train sounds.”
One very noticeable sound effect is the stomping of Rosie the elephant’s feet when she first emerges. Initially the puppeteers just bring in large legs to place on the stage; later the entire elephant puppet comes out. The big thumping sound of the feet is Dobson hitting the kick drum and toms at the same time, and those percussive beats get pumped up into the subwoofers. Later, more menacing elephant footsteps are triggered by the drummer.
“If there’s ever a cue that needs to be accurately timed with action, he’s all onboard to trigger it for us,” Trarbach says. “He has a [Roland] SPD-SX pad on his drum kit that we load up with sound effects, and he can trigger them for us. He’s incredibly reliable.”
Some sound effects are heavy, others more ethereal. Take the dream sequence, which “begins with onstage whispering, accentuated by an underbed of heavily affected whispering and whooshes that swirl through the surround speakers,” Baughman explains. “As the dream progresses, we start to layer in the echoes of the trains, animals and other sounds heard earlier in the show for a subtle heightening of the acrobatic actions onstage. The whooshes were built from simple breath sounds, manipulated with a lot of time-stretching, reverb and delay.”
“In the dream sequence at the end, the way the sound effects and music work together was really key,” Trarbach adds. “We’re very fortunate to have a mixer, Ron Sinko, who is very musical, and he can put any cue on any beat. It’s natural to him, so that helps.”
Bring on The Animals!
The menagerie of circus animal sound effects form a major sonic part of at least two sequences, Baughman explains. “There are zebras, which are hilarious and don’t sound anything like horses, which is what I expected them to sound like. We have tigers and lions, but also layered in are some other animals that just have a really nice sound. There’s even a chipmunk in there because it has a nice little high-pitched sound that added some sparkle to the whole thing.”
Baughman adds that the menagerie section is underscored. “I built the sequence to feel like a layer of the music, with higher and lower pitched elements flowing in and out, and crescendoing with the orchestra,” Baughman elaborates. Other animal sounds include a hyena, cheetah, panda, penguin, lion, and camel.
“We recorded some of the actors doing some animal sounds too,” Trarbach adds. “Some birds and some monkeys, just when we were rehearsing, having fun, and they made it in the show.”
While stereo and surround sound is implemented during the show, it is done judiciously and without depriving audience members from hearing everything. As Trarbach notes, it requires a fine balance to do stereo without some audience members missing some sounds. “But utilizing surround speakers, our main stereo, just different speaker groups, we thought we could play some in the space and add some audio interest,” he says.
Their speaker selection includes Meyer Sound, L-Acoustics, KV2, Genelec and Anchor components. From Meyer Sound, the system includes 30 Leopard, 4 UPQ-2P, 2 UPA-2P, 10 UPJunior, 10 UPM-1P, 2 900-LFC subwoofers and 2 600-HP subwoofers. From L-Acoustics, there are 22 5XT and 18 X8 elements. The system also includes 32 Alcons Audio VR8s and two KV2 ESR215 MKII enclosures.
Managing Elements
The climactic animal stampede, foreshadowed near the start of the show, was the most challenging sequence to design sound for as it involved a lot of lighting and visual cues and “freeze frame” moments on stage. But the opening of the show was also challenging because of everything going on.
“There’s a lot of exposition that happens,” Trarbach says. “There’s 1930’s circus slang, people speaking Polish, and the band’s playing. We really are trying in the first 10 to 15 minutes of the show to make sure we get the story out so that we can capture the audience’s attention. Once we get past the first three numbers, the show pretty much sails for us.”
Even then, a lot of elements have to be managed. All of the acrobats have an occasional line and sing in the ensemble. They also verbally call signals to each other while performing their tricks, even during some musical numbers, so their mics cannot be on when that happens. Occasionally, one acrobat might be standing on another’s head, so using a hairline mic was not an option. Trarbach and his team learned when to mute their mics during the show.
The cast members are miked with Sennheiser MKE 1s, and there are three kinds of wireless transmitters used for the show. There are Shure Axients on micro beltpacks. There are also hats with mics, including the ringmaster’s hat, with Lectrosonic SSMs used due to their size and weight. The audio team could not place a pack on the body of Isabelle McCalla, who plays the ringmaster’s acrobat spouse, because at one point, she slides down a trapeze. So they placed two Sennheiser SK 6212s in her wig.
Something that helped out Trarbach and his team is that the cast spent three weeks on a rehearsal stage to coordinate all of the acrobatics. Therefore, the sound team was able to mix the show and coordinate the sound effects during that time. “That allowed us to get a nice leg up on both the mixing, which is definitely challenging, and the sound effects and integrating them in with the puppetry and all the motions,” Trarbach recalls.
During the rehearsal hall sessions, the audio team learned that the animals were truly characters in the show with their own story arcs. “We needed to very specifically pair puppetry movements with sounds,” Trarbach explains. “If it’s not perfectly in sync, it just doesn’t work. We also found out that the more we were able to put in, the more natural it seemed. If there were four puppet sounds all accompanying actions, it became more believable, or you could more readily trick yourself into thinking that the puppet was a real animal or behaved as such.”
“[It was also about] finding places where the animals would naturally react — there are moments where everyone on stage is freaking out,” Baughman adds. “You don’t see Rosie, but you hear her freaking out offstage because that’s what would happen.”
The System
Trarbach and his crew are running a DiGiCo SD7T Quantum for the show. “We decided to do Dante at 96k which was an interesting challenge,” McKenna says. “We have a bunch of MTP fiber between front of house and backstage to do all of our networking and our Optocore loop. We do all of our AV switching via the Autograph XDANTE-1. That was the first time I used that. PRG built us a little custom logic controller to help us do the switching. Ron was commenting how little analog cable we have between front of house and backstage. We’re almost entirely digital, all the way to the speaker in some cases.”
By splitting some of the inputs on the Quantum, there’s no need for a monitor desk, and they are running around 200 inputs with their split. All of the sound effects have their own cues. Sinko has script pages with green dots for normal cues and red dots for sound effect cues. Some pages have continuous dots because of all the cues, including 105 just for sound effects.
Trarbach says he, McKenna, and Sinko all worked with sound designer Steve Canyon Kennedy on the Ain’t Too Proud musical in this same theater five years ago. “So when we were doing the system [here], we added a starting point and built off what we had done previously,” Trarbach notes. That previous experience gave them a leg up in getting the mix passable quickly, and they’ve been finessing and improving it since then.
“It’s really a fun show for us,” Trarbach declares. “It offers us a lot of opportunities to do conspicuous sound and great fun reverb effects. We put the band into the surround speakers, and vocals in the surround sometimes. We’ve got a bajillion sound effects. We get to do great songs, and we’ve got great singers with spectacular diction, which is so helpful to us. It’s a hoot. We’re just delighted to be part of it.”
PRG Gear list for Water for Elephants
LOUDSPEAKERS
- 30 Meyer Sound Leopard
- 4 Meyer Sound UPQ-2P
- 2 Meyer Sound UPA-2P
- 10 Meyer Sound UPJunior
- 10 Meyer Sound UPM-1P
- 2 Meyer Sound 900-LFC subwoofer
- 2 Meyer Sound 600-HP subwoofer
- 2 KV2 ESR215 MKII
- 32 Alcons Audio VR8
- 22 L-Acoustics 5XT
- 18 L-Acoustics X8
PROCESSING
- 1 Meyer Sound Galileo 616 system
WIRELESS MICROPHONES
- 30 Shure ADX1M micro transmitter
- 4 Shure AD3 plug-on transmitter
- 4 Sennheiser SK6212 mini transmitter
- 4 Lectrosonics SSM micro transmitter
MIXING CONSOLE
- 1 DiGiCo Quantum 7T
